siem reap and angkor wat

Ta Phrom west gate

Up at dawn again for the express boat to Siem Reap, which is a good way to see a little of the country without getting shaken to bits. The first half is along the wide Mekong River, its high banks (at this time of the year as the water is low) are lined throughout with wooden stilt houses of the fishing and farming communities. There are also floating villages which migrate as the waters recede and expand. Later we enter the huge lake in the centre of Cambodia, Tonlé Sap, so vast that we quickly lose sight of the shore.

Mekong village

It’s slightly misty and – rather worryingly – the captain stops at a fishing boat way out in the middle and asks the group of rather sleepy boys it’s carrying for directions. They all nod and smile and point over there, roughly the direction we are going anyway. The fishing boats are dark silhouettes with their perfect mirror-image reflections below them, in a dead calm misty blue world of water and sky – until our wake hits them somewhere behind us, I guess.

It’s two years since I visited Siem Reap and it seems to have a much bigger range of tourist oriented restaurants and cafes, but still on a small scale, still rather charming. There’s an area everyone calls ‘Bar Street’ at the back of the Central Market, and there are the slightly better class establishments sprinkled along the tree-lined banks of the river. It’s all easily walkable – or you can jump on a moto at any street corner – and the dry heat makes it very pleasant at this time of the year, if you keep out of the direct sun. It’s a great base for exploring the temples. I also have found a delightful little hotel, really a series of tiny houses around a garden and pool, with friendly staff and ideal for relaxation after a hard day’s sightseeing.

Actually not that hard, just get a tuk tuk for the day and the driver knows all the places to go. However they tend to have fixed ideas so it’s best to push for your own itinerary. I think it’s best to see Angkor Wat itself in the late afternoon, and to climb Phnom Bakheng – another artificial mountain temple – first thing in the morning; whereas most people do the opposite of this.
My best memories are:
> being at the very top of Phnom Bakheng very early, with no other tourists there at all, seeing the distant shape of Angkor Wat in silhouette amongst the mist
> the elevation of ASngkor Wat seen from its outer courtyard, across a lily pond, in the late afternoon
> walking around one of the artificial lakes as children – some of them monks in their saffron robes – played and splashed in the water, one with his pet monkey
> a little guided tour by local boys on the side to a hidden gateway at Ta Phrom completely buried in the jungle. Vast tree roots had burrowed through the masonry and threatened to topple it. The giant Buddha-like faces with their inscrutable smiles gazed out, east, west, north and south.
> Seeing a troupe of about 15 elephants pass through the main Angkor Tom gateway at quite a lick, their mahouts joshing with each other and with their charges.

Angkor Wat from the inner courtyard

On this trip I have been to quite a few world heritage sites, and I believe that this makes the biggest impression. The architecture is stunning. I now have a much better conception of how this fits in with the other schools of Buddhist and Hindu architecture (both are represented at Angkor). There is a continuum of styles from India and Nepal right through to Bali: in fact this trip has turned into something of a field trip on eastern religious architecture. In Angkor Wat in particular it is hard to think of anything on this scale at any time or place, that has such a unity of vision, such certainty of purpose. Every part of the complex serves to enhance the whole.